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From SimCity to Real Girlfriend: 20 years of sim games

Simulations have been one of gaming's most important genres. In part one of …

Richard Moss
- Jun 21, 2011 3:00 am UTC

Why stop at cities?

Building on the success of SimCity, Maxis soon explored other avenues of simulation. Will Wright's SimEarth (1990) perhaps foreshadowed Spore with its huge scope and a focus on evolution. Playing the role of Gaia, a complex entity first proposed by James Lovelock that ties together all life on Earth and the feedback systems in place to support this life, you were tasked with guiding the development of life through Earth's ten billion year lifespan.

While the game was certainly captivating once you got the hang of how to play, SimEarth bit off more than it could chew—its cluttered visuals and excessive use of menus only added to the confusion when tracking the development of animals, plants, pollution, disease, famine, continents, oceans, people, and other aspects of life on Earth.

SimEarth, a confusing-yet-fascinating game played in classrooms across the world by children of a certain age.

Taking a more focused effort to Earth-based ecosystems, another Wright-led project called SimLife (1992) tried to simulate genetics and the interaction between species and the environment. It (largely) failed as both a game and a scientific simulation, though, as it lacked clarity in player feedback and goal-setting while simultaneously falling short on the intricacies of scientific research on the subject.

The most patient of players were treated to an interactive playground in the spirit of The Island of Doctor Moreau, but everyone else just got frustrated. After the mixed successes and failures of SimEarth, SimLife's inability to make evolution and genetics engaging for a general audience suggested that the inner workings of biological life were too dense a topic even for sim games.

The overly complex SimLife seemed to have menus and detailed tool-tips for everything.

Not so with action/platformer/sim hybrid E.V.O.: Search for Eden, a Super Nintendo game from 1993 (1992 in Japan) that put you in the role of a single life form. You could evolve progressively by collecting and spending evolution points gained from eating other life forms—your choice of meal would both affect and be affected by your development.

Given the considerable liberties E.V.O. took in its simulation of the evolutionary process and its depiction of the geological time scale, it's debatable whether the game even deserves a place in this article—it's among the least realistically modeled titles mentioned and features significant non-sim gameplay elements. But E.V.O. was one of only a few games to capture the essence of evolutionary theory—that of adaptation and natural selection through inherited genetic traits. E.V.O. was a rare console-only sim game, and many of its ideas were reproduced in 2008's evolution-themed hit Spore. For that alone, it earns a mention as an interesting contribution to the evolution of life sims.

E.V.O.: Search for Eden didn't exactly match the science of evolution, but it at least felt like a good approximation.

Spore was anticipated as the "complete" Sim game—a SimEverything—thanks to its enormous scope that took players from primordial goo all the way through their evolution to become galactic traders, with several distinct and separate game modes. Unfortunately for hardcore sim fans, the science behind Spore was played down in the interests of garnering broader appeal.

The result was a game that better modeled ideas of creationism than evolutionary theory, and which felt lacking in all but the final (space) stages and the brilliant Creature Creator (which reached approximately 1.8 million player-created species within eighteen days of Spore's release, and passed the 100 million mark within a year).

Spore disappointed many fans when it played down the huge amount of scientific research that went into its creation.

Hail ants!

SimAnt is one of the stranger games to emerge from the mind of Will Wright—not because it's about an ant colony, but because it has a campaign mode in which your goal is to drive the humans out of their house. It also features an experimental mode in which you can build ant mazes, poison the colony, control a spider, or drive the ants crazy with overuse of pheromone trails.

The real magic of SimAnt was the way it captured the fascination many children have with ants—especially regarding their behavior in a variety of challenging situations (such as when you cover the entry to their nest or drop a spider into their midst).

You played as the leader of the black colony—a sentient being who could switch bodies at will—and could lead assaults against the fiendish ant-lions and spiders or the evil red colony. One of the most fascinating exploits involved infiltrating the red colony—effectively becoming a spy. Done appropriately, you could get the red ants to feed you even as you set about dismantling their nest from the inside.